Raymond Strother
| Raymond Strother | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 18, 1940 Port Arthur, Texas, USA |
| Residence | Bozeman, Montana |
| Alma mater | Louisiana State University |
| Occupation | Campaign manager for Gary Hart in 1984 |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Sandy Peck Strother |
| Children |
Dane Strother |
Dane Strother
Raymond D. Strother (born October 18, 1940) is a nationally known Democratic political consultant, originally from Port Arthur, Texas.
Reared in a politically-active lower middle class home, Strother graduated in 1958 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, renamed in 2002 as Memorial High School. Strother won a track scholarship to Northwestern State University, then Northwestern State College, in , Louisiana. After two years, the administration asked him to leave NSC because of his political activities. He transferred to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There he became the advertising director and then the editor of The Daily Reveille student newspaper. While in Baton Rouge to complete his Master of Arts degree in journalism, Strother was a night reporter and photographer for the Associated Press. His 1965 thesis at LSU correctly predicted that in the future the outcome of political campaigns would depend more on media coverage and advertising than on traditional political organization.
Strother recalls that from his childhood:
"Politics mattered to our lives. People like my family had no other place to turn. I remember as a very small child praying at night to Harry Truman. My father taught me that you had to stand on the picket line ... and you had to get involved in politics — because people like us had no other choice. So I became a political consultant. It was a calling like the ministry. ...Louisiana was my foxhole and I wear the scars on my soul, though I left there in 1980 to move to the District of Columbia. Corruption is an insidious thing. It is a cancer that lives and grows within us without notice. I learned political consulting in Louisiana, perhaps the most corrupt place in America. But strangely enough, most of the people there are not corrupt. They are as good as people everywhere.
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Wikipedia